When seeking attention to overlooked injustices, you must do something bold. Or just sit down.

Brigid Sheils Makowski chose to sit, and it worked. In 1970, her week-long sit-in with her five children at the British Consulate in Philadelphia ended media silence about British Army killing unarmed civilians in Belfast.

That political protest is one of many recounted by this Bogside-born Derry woman whose father fought in the original IRA against British colonization and its partition of Ireland. At eighteen, she went to Philadelphia to marry Polish-American Leo Makowski. She recounts...